Is Brendan Kiley A Wrong-Headed Asshole?

Over at Just Wrought, NewsWrights Producer and playwright Paul Mullin summarizes the a.WAKE.ning event we did last week. We had a short performance from The New New News and a really excellent panel discussion featuring many working journalists.

The most lively exchange of the night, as Paul writes, was between Art Thiel and Brendan Kiley (emphasis mine):

Several good friends gave me their feedback in the days after and nearly all of them specifically mentioned the earnest and well-argued exchange between Art Thiel and Brendan Kiley regarding the definition of a journalist. Is it, as Art argued, an expert in a certain field or, per Brendan, an aggressive novice? One friend clearly felt Brendan played the wrong-headed asshole in the debate; the other friend, however, remarked on how freaked out he was by what he viewed as Art’s vehement defensiveness.

As fashionable as it is to shit on Brendan Kiley, I actually want to jump in and defend him from this anonymous source.

Kiley's point wasn't exactly that the ideal journalist is an aggressive novice. His point was that the defining characteristic of a great journalist is courage, contra Thiel's contention that the defining characteristic is expertise. But, in fairness, Kiley didn't do a terrific job of articulating that idea.

It seemed to me that both Kiley and Thiel were describing a journalistic ideal through the frame of their own self-perception. Art Thiel is clearly an expert. Kiley is, by his own admission last Monday, not a trained journalist, and when engaging in long-form pieces like his recent series about tainted cocaine, not an expert either.

I actually agree with both men. My ideal journalist is a person who is both expert and courageous: people like Charlie Savage and Jane Mayer. These are the heroes that bring dark deeds to the light.

So, no, Brendan Kiley wasn't wrong. He just wasn't completely right.

From The Actors #2

We asked our actors from The New New News Staged Reading to give their thoughts on the art and process. Here's a few words from Betty Campbell. - ed.

First of all want to say thanks to NewsWrights for doing what you are doing. I am a big fan and you are dealing with ideas that really reverberate with me as vitally important: Information is power; money controls flow of information; the impact of modern technology on the creation and dissemination of information; TMI is just noise. I think it's scary.

And for you, in a process that is collaborative, to create a piece of theatre that is entertaining, that is really about important ideas, without being polemical is sure a challenge. But you're definitely on the way. What we read on the 24th (and the good comments you got from cast and audience that day) has so much great stuff in it and I don't have the kind of smarts that could really advise you how to make it better....I could see enough there to make more than one play (maybe a separate one that is about the relevance of journalism/ professor/ tenure).

Georgiana* had a good statement..."Tis a gift to be simple". I so look froward to the next iteration of The New New News.

*Georgiana was Betty's character in the staged reading; she's an elderly Seattleite whose political blog becomes suddenly and surprisingly popular.

Why I'm Excited for a.WAKE.ning

It's pretty simple -- because you'll (probably) never see these local media luminaries on a single stage ever again.

NewsWrights Producer Tom Paulson, NPR global health blogger and 20-year veteran of the Seattle P-I, will moderate a panel discussion on new media. The panel is scheduled to include Pulitzer Prize-winning P-I political cartoonist Dave Horsey, Monica Guzman of Intersect.com, Publicola's Josh Feit, local sportswriting legend Art Thiel, The Stranger theatre critic Brendan Kiley, and Chris Grygiel, coordinator of political coverage for the P-I blogs.

Toss in a free drink, snacks, live theatre, interactive media art and original commissioned visual work, and you have an epic value for your $20 ticket.

Why do we need the money? Because we're paying real wages to real actors and going on a three-location tour. It's a great event for a great company and I hope you'll join us.

From the Actors

We asked our actors from The New New News Staged Reading to give their thoughts on the art and process.  Here's a few words from Becky Chong.  - ed.

My two cents.  Hahha...they're kind of all over the place but it's just what has been percolating.

The New New News reading was quite the educational experience for me.  I am not a user on Twitter and was surprised by how these mediums of communication (Twitter, texting, Facebook, YouTube, etc) are translated into the world of journalism.  What exactly is the face of today's Journalism--and is the current technology necessarily an advantage for catapulting Journalism where it seems to be heading? 

I do feel that in many ways it takes away the artistic value of journalism.  Max's thesis on the death of journalism* (and if people will even be teaching it in the future) is very disheartening. 

Many times it feels like, for the average user, that technological advances are happening way too fast and it's hard to catch up.  I perform shows at schools and I remember one elementary school where all the students were given rental laptops for the whole year.  That generation is growing up where magazines, newspapers, paperbooks, etc are a thing of the past and digital communication is the ruler; where reality television is a normal part of life; where with a click of their fingers, and within a few seconds, they can post a video on YouTube to make something news-worthy.  

One more thing that really shook me up was that you have to ask--if you have all these people who are telling these stories--how much of what they are saying is credible?  And what exactly in The New New News is true?  I left feeling even more confused as to what the real story was and what was chopped up to make it a luring, engaging story.  What is fact and how do you trust the media regardless of what medium its being distributed.  What is NEWS when the people who are covering the stories being covered become part of the news themselves?

becks :)

*The character of Max in The New New News is a Professor of Journalism applying for tenure. - ed.

Reporting on the inside from the outside in

I got my first real look at The New New News last night. I’ve been part of the high-level talks on the project, which was inevitable given my penchant for pontificating on media issues anyway, but have had to step back from the script meetings and workshop as producer duties (read: all the paperwork Paul and Dawson hate to deal with and hired me for) have demanded my time.

So, when I sat down for last night’s reading having caught only the last five minutes of rehearsal and a few minutes of director notes, I felt very much like I was looking at this from the outside. A well-informed witness to a moment deep inside the development process, but on the outside nonetheless.

And, as I told Paul and Dawson afterwards, I was at times more compelled than I thought I would be, and at times more detached and outside the narrative than I thought I would be. Which is really perfect for this stage. All the potential is there, and we’re at the right stage to trim away anything that is preventing that potential from reaching actuality.

A brief and purposely obtuse collections of my notes from last night: found Pete the most engaging – he’s the noble “should”; Art’s guru misadvice = SEO; desire for Robot Chicken static jump-cuts disturbing; [name redacted]’s transformation is beautiful and perfect and the arc to which all other character arcs should aspire; not sure Paul has his numbers right; sometimes yet-to-be-written scenes should stay that way; Terence McKenna on X, nitrous and 72 hours of Powerpuff Girls (I think this had more to do with what I wanted to see than what I saw); failure doesn’t die to live another day.

The clearest thought I walked away with, though, was that this form, the Living Newspaper, has a place in the present day and the present conversation. Theatre and journalism are struggling and failing in such similar ways, it seems natural they might find similar solutions, and I’m putting my money on local.

Special thanks to all the actors that spent their weekend working on this piece – you did an amazing job and we can’t sufficiently show our appreciation for you volunteering your time. Thank you Holly Arsenault, Noah Benezra, John Bogar, Betty Campbell, Becky Chong, David Gehrman, Stephen Hando, Amy Love and John Q. Smith.

Hashtag for Tonight's Live-Tweeting

I'm sitting in the theatre at North Seattle Community College watching our outstanding team of actors do a readthrough. The public reading is tonight at 7:00 PM -- will you be there? It's free!

I've even created a super-sweet hashtag so that nerds and iPhonies can live-tweet their experience:

#NNNews

That's short for The New New News which is the name of the play.

See you soon!

Sitting in on a Script Meeting

Paul and Dawson invited me to sit in on their script meeting last Wednesday; they were taking the sundry pieces and scenes that the two of them had written (mostly) independently and putting them in a sensible order.

Now this wasn't the first time in history that two writers put some scenes in order, so I won't pretend like this is headline news. But this play engages Seattle's recent history and a very particular moment in the development of information technology, and our focus on new and instantaneous media raises some interesting structural questions.

About a year ago I had the pleasure of interviewing David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet over the phone. Kronos Quartet frequently collaborates with artists and musicians who work outside the traditional Western musical vocabulary. David talked about needing to invent a brand new process every time they embark on a new project.

I thought of Kronos as I watched Dawson scrawl acronymic scene titles on giant post-it notes, scratch them out, and replace them with some other piece of code as Paul decided on the fly what he is and isn't willing to cut. Tom Paulson and I had a few moments of, "You following this?" because, as artistic collaborators so often do, Paul and Dawson had developed a project-specific shared vocabulary.

"Well, yes, I agree. It's just Oscar --"
"Right. Yes, absolutely."
"I'm wondering about --"
"Right. What about the tweets?"
"Well -- hahaha."

And so on.

There's no "right" way to tell a story, and there certainly isn't a template for a project like this. There are practical considerations -- the passage of time within a story thread, for example -- and considerations on pacing and flow that will guide the audience experience. What's really special about this play is that we're studying an instantaneous form of communication while working in an ancient (and in many ways, lumbering and laborious) form of communication.

We have a staged reading coming up this weekend and we'll see if it all goes together. I for one am looking forward to seeing those giant post-its come to life.

The Hamster Wheel

Journalism today is a Hamster Wheel, according to one observer:

"The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics."

That's a quote from this really entertaining article in the Columbia Journalism Review, by Dean Starkman. If you want to get a sense of why journalists (the ones who still have jobs) look so tired and can't complete their sentences, read this.

Blogger quits US News because her words made into ads

Here's an interesting case of how blurred the line is getting between reporting and advertising.

Mary Knudson, a prominent science writer, discovered that individual words on posts for a health blog she was writing for U.S. News and World Report were linking to ads for hospitals, drugs and so forth. Mary quit the job because she had no control over how her words were linked to advertised products and services.

Here's Mary's story -- "Why I Won't Blog for U.S. News and World Report" -- published by another science journalist (and friend of mine), Deb Blum.

Are you writing or being written?

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, and believe it is going to be important to the work we are doing with NewsWrights United.

(Full disclosure: I’ve been following Rushkoff’s work since the mid-90s, consider myself a huge fan, have participated on the discussion lists he moderates for over a decade and have had some correspondence with him. Grain-of-salt that as you will.)

Rushkoff’s central idea is that we have become increasingly disconnected from these machines with which we spend so much of our time. Computer training is actually application training; fewer and fewer of us understand how to program, have ceded the power to shape our world to others.



I’d argue (and maybe he argues – my copy hasn’t arrived yet) that this is especially true with journalism. Because everyone, absolutely every single information source, from content producer to aggregator, has an agenda. You can argue for the relative benevolence or FoxNewsiness of one agenda over another, but each writes from and to its own worldview.

If you aren’t taking an active role in your information gathering, if you aren’t thinking about the choices you make and looking for diverse perspectives in some kind of attempt to triangulate on a real truth, you are swallowing someone’s agenda whole. You’ve stopped listening to your own story, stopped writing your own narrative.

And this is where it becomes important to NewsWrights. Because, yes, we are just another voice hawking it’s agenda, it’s narratives. But the Living Newspaper is about more than the stories it covers. We present local, topical stories as live theatre because it is unexpected, because it is different from the ways we are used to seeing these stories covered and presented. And there is something in that move, in the audience being invited to think about not just the content but the form and the implications of the form.

When I taught composition, I explained it to my students as the move from reflexive to reflective. I was asking them to become more conscious of what they were doing with their writing, to ask themselves questions, to be purposeful. The Living Newspaper asks us to be conscious and reflective on how we get our stories and what that means to our concept of the world around us.

Are we writers or written? Programmers or programmed?

Library Use Way Up For Things Libraries Weren't Built For

Yesterday I had the pleasure of sitting in on a Book Club discussion with author James Gavin and Kirkland librarian Elsa Steele (as part of my work with Kirkland Performance Center). One interesting point of conversation, extant to our project here, was library usage.

As our information diet is consumed via devices of increasing technological sophistication, what's up with that old jalopy The Book, and its antique storehouse, The Library?

Well, the American Library Association (which, it should be noted, is obviously interested in building a positive image of the library's vitality) published a report in April, the State of America's Libraries Report 2010 that seeks to answer this very question. Apparently usage is way up and public opinion of libraries is way up, too.

This is pretty intuitive given the state of the economy. Who else is handing out free books and movies? It's also not surprising that Academic Libraries are adding more and more electronic resources, which I imagine are far more affordable and convenient than giant bound reference collections. There's also a pretty funny section on how badly libraries suck at using Facebook and Flickr (editorial note: who the hell cares if libraries use Facebook?).

A chief driver of library use was job-hunting. With its free internet and cheap printing the library is clearly ideal for this in-demand activity. What's really shocking is how much public assistance library staff are offering.

Two-thirds of public libraries help patrons complete online job applications; provide access to job databases and other online resources (88 percent) and civil service exam materials (75 percent); and offer software or other resources (69 percent) to help patrons create resumes and other employment materials. Forty-two percent of urban libraries report offering classes related to job-seeking, and about 27 percent collaborate with outside agencies or individuals to help patrons complete online job applications. (page i)

....

“Public libraries often are the only organizations within a community that can help individuals interact with government agencies and access e-government services,” ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels said in an ALA press release in June 2009. “As more and more government information and services are becoming only available on line, there is an urgent need for governments to collaborate with public libraries to provide e-government services that best meet community needs.” (page 21)

Apparently librarians are social workers, too. Personally I think this is pretty embarrassing for the state of our social fabric.

These new trends must really be overwhelming the attention of our libraries because this report had virtually nothing in it about books! So if anyone has any info about that, let me know. Is this depressing?

Calling All Artists!

NewsWrights United, an Associated Program of Shunpike, is soliciting proposals from artists in all visual media for installations/exhibitions for Journalism: a.WAKE.ning?, a fundraiser taking place at the Upstairs Galley above Theatre Off Jackson on November 15, 2010. NewsWrights will select three proposals and award a $100 honorarium to each.

Journalism: a.WAKE.ning? is an event to raise support and awareness for the programs of NewsWrights United, and specifically their February 2011 production of The New News News. NewsWrights United produces the Living Newspaper - local, topical stories pursued with journalistic rigor and presented through the medium of live theatre.

Journalism: a.WAKE.ning? will, through a show preview and panel discussion, as whether journalism in the age of new media is on the verge of rebirth, or is simply dead. Proposed projects should examine issues related to media and journalism, with a specific focus on new media, monetization model and their implications. Installations must require minimum hardware and set-up time. For more information, contact NewsWrights United Managing Producer Jim Jewell at jim@newswrightsunited.org.

Applications will be accepted and evaluated on a rolling basis until October 15, 2010, but may close at any time should three proposals be accepted.

Why This Matters - Dawson Nichols

There are so many reasons, but here is an example with which I am currently working.

Hansen Hosein, the UW’s new media guru, is starting a “Storytelling Uprising,” proudly proclaiming that he “gets lost exploring the future of communication through storytelling and digital media.”

http://www.facebook.com/StorytellerUprising

It’s a great example of how stream-of-consciousness is the mode of communication of the day. It has infected all forms of communication from journalism to personal journaling to social conversation. These days there is no need to organize thought – certainly no need to organize it in different ways for different purposes. If the Director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the UW is happily getting lost in his own communications and regurgitating ideas haphazardly, why shouldn’t we.

Well, we do. And it feels good. And everyone’s doing it, so it feels safe too. Never mind that it’s luring us all into mediating our lives and distancing us from one another. Look at the Twitter ad Hosein extols in the above Facebook blog (Sept. 14 post).

I find this ad distressing in so many ways, but here are a couple of examples:

First, the underlying message of the ad is that an experience is validated by being cataloged or reported through Twitter. The ad is based on a romance, the idea being that Twitter can help with this real-world activity. But the people literally have no faces until they are online. In the real world they are bodies only, and it is not until they embrace this new media that they have individuality and identity. The culmination of the date is getting it documented online. This is one of the great invidious lures of new media. You are anonymous in the real world, but online you have friends – followers even.

Second, the new medium is sold by appealing to the nostalgia of actual sensual experience. The technologies of the actual date are a vinyl record, a book, a bottle of wine, the moon. But these things are referents only – we don’t hear the record, we get no excerpt from the book, the wine is never even opened, the moon is only useful because it can be photographed and placed in a tweet to show that romance was possible. This is the sort of short-handing that has become ubiquitous in storytelling today (don’t get me started about current writers’ use of plot points rather than actual plot), and it can diminish actual experience just as it diminishes stories. The experience becomes nothing more than a useful tool to enrich our online presence. The not-even-close-to-clever self-referential embedding of the ad itself (even Land-O-Lakes was way ahead of you, Twitterheads) within the ad toward the end plays this out. The roulette wheel of other tweets fades to black, suggesting that so many other experiences – as gratifying and enriching as the date – are documented online. So… spend more time online avoiding the actual experiences the bodies you saw documented for you.

Does this seem off-topic for a play about journalism in the new media environment? Well, I’ll turn this into a teaser by saying that if you want to see how it relates you’ll have to actually bring your body along with your brain to see the play in a live theater. Have a sensual experience with other people who are engaged in the same activity.

Of course, we encourage you to tweet and blog about it after.

The Great Upheaval

Here's a great talk about media consumption and theater and where we're all headed.

Cameron is extremely enthusiastic and articulate despite being a bit inaccurate at times - which the comments after the video call out. He is also quite optimistic, but it should be noted that this optimism is the luxury of a person with a steady paycheck. The cultural upheaval he describes is viewed differently by those whose livelihoods are at stake and who must navigate these troubled waters in order to survive. Those people who are leaving the theater because they can't make a living there any more are most likely not so sanguine about the changes.

I like a great deal of what Cameron says here, but the other thing I find troubling is his easy mention of the way in which current technologies are allowing amateurs to act as professionals. When this happens in theater this phenomenon is upsetting because it decreases the number of people who can make a living at the art form. That's upsetting, but it's not threatening. This same phenomenon, applied to journalism, IS threatening. As professional journalists are displaced we have fewer and fewer people who investigate injustice, hold power accountable, etc. Horsey's recent cartoon sums up the problem nicely.

WikiScene Is Live

Announcing -- The New New News WikiScene!

We decided long ago that a play about new media needed to incorporate new media into its creative process. So far, that has been mostly limited to conversations on Facebook that have informed our research and writing process.

Now we're taking it to the next level. You can literally be one of our writers.

The New New News WikiScene is a collaboratively written "play within a play" inspired by a New York Times article (Update: as published in the Seattle Times) about how multitasking affects your ability to focus. It will be created by an online community and actually performed this February.

Unlike other wikis, we decided to just use a Google Doc, with a nice, familiar word processing interface. That way even a luddite like Paul Mullin can figure it out.

The instructions are simple: Anyone can edit any element of the scene. However, a few elements are non-negotiable:
1: The instructions cannot be edited
2: The scene must tell a story with a beginning, middle and end
3: The characters must learn something about themselves
4: All participating writers must read this article and use it as inspiration: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2012049123_webmultitask07.html

That's it! I should mention that when you contribute to the scene, anything you write becomes the property of NewsWrights United. Nobody's getting rich off of this -- believe me -- but just to be clear so there aren't any hurt feelings.

Click here to help write The New New News WikiScene!

Bonus: use the chat function! The chat bar looks like this:



Click on it, and you'll get a chat window that looks like this:


You can confer with other contributors in real time. Sweet!

Help write The New New News WikiScene!

Why This is Important

We asked each of our creative team members to write a short essay on why this project matters to them. This is the third of five. -Ed.

I’m a marketing & PR guy. It’s not a statement that draws the most positive of responses, but there it is. I got an undergraduate degree in advertising, avoided the agency path, kicked about and fell into theatre. I became show people late in life.

But, I was always about marketing and PR. Artists, I have found, have an inherent distrust of my world. I recall one producer that actually went green when I said a good logo had to “work on an almost subliminal level.” This is seen as some dark magic.

So I wasn’t surprised when I sensed some resistance the first time I introduced the phrase “talking points” at a NewsWright United producers’ meeting. It’s an understandable reaction. These are creative people engaged in the act of creation, and have little desire to be told what it is they are doing. And “talking points” smacks so much of politicians, is maybe too close to “talking heads” (and not the good kind fronted by David Byrne).

But, they were patient and trusting enough to let me ramble and attempt to demystify. I do this more often than you might think, defending some practice of my profession that seems somehow unsavory to the integrity of artists.

It is important that these talking points aren’t meant as a recipe for deception or a menu for spin. They are an attempt to build a commonplace among the diverse voices that make up NewsWrights. There is nothing prescriptive about them. They aren’t a set of directions, but rather the outline of a map, so even though we may each describe it in a different way, we are all talking about the same place.

And there is a spirit of transparency in the talking points, which should be reflected in our use of them. So our talking points are not the internal document talking points so often become, but hopefully another potential point of departure for discussion among ourselves and with our audience.

In form, they answer the question we have to ask ourselves in so many different ways throughout this process: why is this important?

NewsWrights United was formed to produce Living Newspapers, an endeavor we feel is vitally important to the continued health of our democracy and future of American theatre.

Important to the art form:
Theatre is an art form of here and now. We’re exploring and refining the form of the Living Newspaper as a viable theatrical form for topical plays that are accessible and avoid didacticism. Theatre needs this infusion of immediacy and locality to remain relevant.

Important to the community:
While of national significance, the stories of the Living Newspaper are all essentially local. The producers, artists and students are from this community, and are working to advance an emerging model of theatre production that relies on strategic partnerships.

Important to the students:
Participating students get the opportunity to work with professional playwrights and journalists through a script development process, alongside professional actors, both Equity and non-union, and with professional production support.

Important to the discourse:
In an increasingly fragmented and disconnected media environment, the Living Newspaper combines a new media sensibility with the emotional intimacy of theatre to speak with a nuanced, personal voice. We embrace a high-transparency approach that mirrors and validates the role of the citizen journalist.

As media outlets move toward more hyper-local coverage, theatre, with its essential localism and grounding in time/place, is perfectly positioned to join the journalism conversation in a substantive way.

NewsWrights United produces the Living Newspaper in response to the increasing contentious and chaotic nature of the news media, answering the self-validation provided my cloistered interest groups with the shared experience of live performance.

Important to RIGHT NOW:
Civilization vs. chaos; the health of democracy in the information age; reflective vs. reflexive news media consumption; accountability vacuum; individual-empowering technology co-opted by institutional and corporate interests; credibility gap; a time of astonishingly rapid evolution in technology and media, developing well beyond its ability to consider the implications; the need for heart to go with all this head; antidote to screaming head culture.


Jim Jewell
Managing Producer
NewsWrights United

Why This Matters

We asked each of our creative team members to write a short essay on why this project matters to them. Here's the second of five. -Ed.

Fresh theatre is living theatre. I hold this truth to be self-evident. I have held it so for a very long time, but have only argued it publically and formally for about 9 months, since launching my blog Just Wrought, and its first in a series of essays, “Theatre Takes Place: Why Locally Grown Plays Matter”. By itself, the notion is not terribly controversial. The argument comes when we theatre professionals attempt to determine whether you can make something fresh with 10 year-old, 20-year-old, 50-year old and 500-year old ingredients. I say, “Well… sometimes.” My esteemed adversaries in this ongoing argument defiantly avow “Always!”, and then they sink a staggering amount of effort into convincing their audience, and more importantly, themselves that that so long as you have excellently trained and accomplished actors, insightful and renowned directors and designers, plenty of money from donors and an interested public, you can always make the already existing great plays of the canon fresh.

I disagree.

In reality you need actual fresh content to keep plays fresh, and theatre alive; and fresh content only comes from creating new plays. And thus, as much as the ascendancy of "The Director" in the 19th Century, and "The Artistic Director" in the 20th, seemed to herald the demise of the playwright, the playwright remains a necessary component— perhaps the necessary component—of ensuring theatre remains a living—and not merely a museum-- art form.

We at NewsWrights United believe that employing the theatrical form of the living newspaper to cover local news is one of the best ways of injecting fresh, locally compelling, material into the theatrical canon. That alone, however, is not enough to answer why this project matters. Happily, when we produced our first edition It’s Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper, we noticed an added bonus. The people that came—and we sold out nearly every night—came not to see excellent theatre adeptly presented by trained professionals but rather stories about a local newspaper that they loved (or hated) that had died recently. In other words, they came to see themselves.


When theatre offers the new and the relevant, it matters and lives. When it offers only the polished and perfect-- plays we all already know-- it dies a museum death.

We are doing this project because journalism matters. We are also doing it because theatre matters. When blended they achieve an almost explosive synergy. Why? It’s simple. Audiences matter. Stories matter. The rest is icing. Sometimes icing is delightful, but it will not keep you alive in the long run.

Twitter Archeology

The amazing thing about Twitter, and its user-created hashtags, is that it lets everyone see what the hot topic is right now, this very instant, and maybe the instant right after this one. But how good is it at archiving those conversations so we can examine the hot topic at some later date?

As part of the writing process for The New New News, Paul Mullin asked me to find “all the tweets about Maurice Clemmons.” So, just like Indy, I donned my Stetson hat, clipped my whip to my waistband and went out adventurin'.

First thing I did was log in to Twitter and type “Maurice Clemmons” and the associated hashtag #WAShooting into the search bar. No results. Next, acting on a tip from Paul, I scoped out the Library of Congress, who has a deal with Twitter to archive all of the tweets, ever. You can't search this archive online. I emailed the LOC help desk and they said that they can't search the archive, either. Because the archive isn't actually in their building yet.

Then I did other things for about three weeks.

Paul wondered what had happened, so he emailed me, and I dusted myself off and journeyed into Google. You can now get tweets in your search results, and they backlog them as far as they can.

Unfortunately for this project, the Google search results don't go back in time far enough to capture the moment, and they aren't comprehensive. So then I searched for #WAShooting.


"Was hooting." I didn't get it at first.

I scrolled a little further down the results page...


And I was led to a site called Twapper Keeper, which, as it turns out, does exactly what I need: it archives tweets, sorts by hashtags, and creates archive files that export as .csv. Perfect! But the only reason I found it is because @kenrufo was on the same archeological expedition, just a few days before me. If I had taken this trip in June, I would have come up empty-handed.

I now have 5,700 tweets containing #WAShooting. I'm guessing there's more out there, and certainly many thousands with the phrase “Maurice Clemmons.” This will have to do for now. Sort of interesting that this obscure little site did for me what the Library of Congress couldn't.

Why This Matters

We asked each of our creative team members to write a short essay on why this project matters to them. Here's the first of five. -Ed.

We are plunging headlong into a great epistemological frontier. For generations, Westerners have turned to journalistic news sources to learn what happens and why. Now that these institutions are disintegrating, it isn't clear where objective information is supposed to come from. It's not even clear what the word “objective” even means any more.

Every person with an internet connection can gather information, on events both current and historical, through an established ideological filter. This filter can be set up deliberately or it can arise organically through social networks, email, and repeat patronage of selected news sources. We can customize, personalize and pre-editorialize not just our opinions, but our facts, too. Inconvenient facts therefore need not exist. This can all be accomplished without reducing the quantity of knowledge whatsoever, creating an alternate but seemingly complete reality, unique to each person.

The gates to understanding are falling away. We are left without a general consensus on what happens—yet alone a consensus on why.

What is the human cost?

This project matters to me because theatre is uniquely equipped to examine this epistemological frontier from a humanist perspective. Or, to be less college-boy about it, what happens when we don't know what we do and don't know? How would a group of people react to the very idea of knowledge changing?

I realize that to an extent this is a resurrection of ancient debates. But it still matters. Our society has a lot of decisions to make and we can't even agree on the facts that we're basing these decisions on. And if we fail to make these decisions wisely, it won't be because of this or that politician, or some particular special interest group, or any given faction of people. The failure will be within our own minds, because before power comes from guns or from money, it comes from ideas.